by Bill Rowe
When I gave Brent the bare bones of what had happened, he put the whole scenario together. “The old bastard tried to use you,” he said. “He tried to exploit my best friend, and failing in that, now his displeasure is causing your firm to scuttle your career. I’m going to have a hard time living with that.”
Brent stayed on with his father for another couple of months. Then, when Revenue Canada zeroed in on the registered deed with the backdate and started asking the purchaser about the long gap between the signing and the registration and intimated that he might be liable for any tax losses by the government, he spilled all the beans. Both the seller, Anstey, and the purchaser blamed the lawyer, saying he had advised them that it was okay to date it to the start of negotiations, even if it was not really clear and certain that an effective agreement had been arrived at back then. Criminal proceedings were contemplated against the seller and buyer but did not go ahead because it would be hard to prove wilful intent on the part of clients simply following legal advice. But disciplinary proceedings were brought against the lawyer by the Law Society, which resulted in a heavy fine and his public suspension from practice for several months.
“The old prick,” said Brent. “That’s what would have happened to you if you had done what he wanted. I’m out of there.” He left his father’s business after a vicious verbal scrap and spent months looking for a new job, finally landing one as office manager-bookkeeper with a small concern at a severely reduced income. It wasn’t long before Brent’s wife, Debra, decided she wanted to move back to her hometown in Oregon, and Brent was only too happy to get as far away from his father as he could.
SEARCHING AROUND FOR A wall to hang my law degre eon, I was recruited by the Department of Justice in St. John’s, or, more precisely, by Lucy Barrett, now assistant deputy minister of the department. Part of the attraction, I could not deny, was a desire to get on the inside, gain access to police reports, and have a good gawk at whatever file existed on me and Rosie up there.
After my interview for the job of Solicitor One—low man on the totem pole—Lucy Barrett invited me into her office for a chat. She wanted, she said, to catch up on my activities since the trial. She was aware, she added, that I’d been kicked out of my law firm for the sin of integrity. They called it “naive integrity” down there, I replied. She sat me down in front of her desk and she then came around to the front herself, but instead of sitting in the other chair, she leaned back and partially sat on the edge of her desk. She looked very good. “Whatever it’s called on Duckworth Street,” she said, “I want a piece of it up here.” Well into her forties now and recently divorced, Lucy was one extremely attractive woman. “I expected you and Rosie to go on forever, the way you stood by her through that Rothesay nightmare. And she was so in love with you.”
“When you’re young,” I said, “physical separation puts a big strain on a relationship. And the earlier tragedy of Pagan and then Rothesay’s suicide, with all its suspicions, affected us more than we thought at the time, too.”
“The whole thing was insufferable, wasn’t it, the hung jury, and then Rothesay going over the cliff before we could nail him judicially? I suppose he got his comeuppance extra-judicially, you might say, although I shouldn’t wish that on anyone, even a rat like him.”
“Well, I’d be lying, Ms. Barrett, if I said I was broken-hearted when I heard about it.”
Lucy pushed her buttocks off the edge of her desk and came close to me with a big smile. “Dropping our professional masks for a moment,” she murmured conspiratorially, “me too. I said to myself at the time: If it was an accident, then there is a God. If it was suicide, then he finally did the right thing. If it was foul play, then let’s award the perpetrator the Order of Canada.”
We laughed, and I said, “One of the reasons I’m a lawyer today, Ms. Barrett, was because of you at that trial. It’s amazing in retrospect how close you came to winning that virtually impossible case.”
“I never had any regrets over giving that one a shot,” said Lucy, extending her hand. “Thank you and welcome aboard, Mr. Sharpe. My door is always open to you. I trust you will enjoy yourself here.”
The first chance I got, I went into the confidential files and looked at the police report on the death of Heathcliff Rothesay. In brief, it said that if Thomas Sharpe had been alone with Rothesay on Red Cliff, there might be reason to pursue the investigation in the hope of obtaining an admission from him. As it was, he did appear uncomfortable and evasive and certainly had the motive. This motive, entailing details of Rothesay’s sex with Rosie, filled two pages, single-spaced. But because Ms. Rosie O’Dell was there too, who impressed the investigators with her forthrightness and transparency, and who had had ample opportunity for years past to commit homicide on Rothesay at home and elsewhere, had she been so motivated, the case remained unproven. The presence of lawyer Barry, Q. C. also presented an obstacle to confession or use of an informant or an effective sting operation to implicate the male suspect. The upshot was to leave the file open with a tentative conclusion of death by misadventure, bearing in mind, the report concluded, that there was no statute of limitations on the laying of a charge of murder.
FOUR YEARS WENT BY before I saw Brent again. He came home from Vancouver, where he had moved after he split from his wife, for his mother’s funeral; she had died in her early fifties from lung cancer. After the funeral, from which I excused myself on the grounds that his father would be present, an action which Brent said he understood profoundly, he and I had a drink and filled in the gaps between our infrequent and unnewsy letters. “Poor Mom,” he said. “She never had a cigarette in her life. The old man killed her with his second-hand smoke. He’s still smoking like a tilt and he’s still alive. Where’s the bloody justice?”
I knew that Brent and his wife, Debra, had split up by mutual consent. He probably would have stayed with her forever, he told me, but she said that because of his emotional indifference to her, she’d be happy living by herself with their two sons. Meanwhile, Brent informed me that a few months ago he had moved to Vancouver, even though it made visits with his beloved sons difficult. Brent never liked living in the States, he said. He’d much rather be in Canada. “I didn’t realize you had moved to Vancouver,” I said. “Do you get a chance to see Rosie and Suzy there?”
“Yes, the three of us get together quite often.”
“How are they making out? Are they still an item?”
“An item? What do you mean? Who?”
“Her and Suzy. Aren’t they living together?”
“No. Why would they be? They have their own apartments about a mile apart. Rosie’s mother lives with her.”
This intelligence from Brent started me on my campaign again. I wrote Rosie letters and I telephoned her, but I never got an answer except once. In the last letter I wrote I ended it nastily: “I know I hurt you badly and you can’t forgive me, so I suppose I should thank my lucky stars that I’m still alive.” The typewritten reply came back unsigned in an envelope postmarked Vancouver: “That was uncalled for. And besides, it was all your big idea. Please stop.” The next staggering news I got from Vancouver a few months later was that Rosie had married Brent.
When I ran into Suzy later in St. John’s, back to visit her mother, I asked her why Rosie had done such a thing. “Because,” she said, “she knows she can depend on Brent. Brent is a good man. Brent will never let her down. Brent is loyal like me.”
“Loyal? He let a sick friend he was supposed to be looking after die of exposure. He left his own father’s business in the lurch. He left his wife and children. And now he marries his best friend’s girl. Yeah, that’s real loyalty to everyone.”
“He took in his drunken, drug-addled, so-called friend, really his enemy, to try to help him and at the same time save your ass from criminal charges. He left his despicable father because of what he tried to do to you. He didn’t leave his wife; she left him as soon as she decently could when he was no longer the merchant p
rince. He married his best friend’s girl years after his best friend had broken her heart in pieces and lost her forever. Get the fuck over yourself, Tom.”
“All right, I will. Rosie has gone to bed with my best friend, so it’s only right and proper that I go to bed with hers. What do you say, Suzy?”
“Don’t worry, I would, Tom. I gathered from Rosie you weren’t that bad in the sack. But my Fred mightn’t like it.”
“Who the hell is Fred?”
“The gronk I’m engaged to. Are you cut off and out of the loop over here or something?”
“I seem to be,” I said. And I never felt more alone in my life.
A YEAR AFTER THAT, I escaped into marriage. Looking back at it afterwards, I could see it would not have mattered whom I had married. My first bride happened to be a young teacher named Jenny. She was sweet and pretty and intelligent and had always chosen such nice lads as her beaux before me that she’d had no prior practice in dealing with a heart mindlessly broken by her beloved’s lack of love. She could not comprehend what was befalling her.
“You can’t even hide it,” Jenny told me. “You don’t love me, you love someone else. I felt something was missing even before we got married. I was just too stupid to realize that a man could go ahead with marriage in spite of feeling like that.” When I didn’t deny anything, she demanded, “Why did you marry me in the first place?” When I couldn’t answer the question, she screeched through her tears, “Who is it, for God’s sake? Will you at least tell me that?” When I wouldn’t supply a name, she said quietly, “I can’t live like this, Tom, I’m sorry.”
“Please forgive me for hurting you, Jenny,” I’d whispered, clinging to her as she wept. “Please forgive me.” That marriage lasted ten months.
No more poor little Jennys, I vowed to myself, would hear my vows of commitment. But I was wrong. Driven by a need, after a couple more decades of unattached sex, to settle quietly and comfortably down, I felt mature enough to marry again. Sally was thirteen years younger than me and her list of positive attributes would have cost a fortune to describe in a lonely hearts column. But after nine months of cohabitation, this conversation took place:
“Sweetie,” said Sally, “I’ve gone off the pill.”
“I didn’t know you were on the pill. Why were you on it?”
“Sweetie! You must have known I was on the pill before we were married. I didn’t want to risk getting pregnant then.”
“No, I didn’t know.”
“Well, I’ve been off it for about six months now, and I can’t seem to get pregnant.”
“Why would you want to get pregnant? I told you before we got married there weren’t going to be any children. And you said you were okay with that.”
“I know that’s what we said, hun, but everyone, deep down, wants children.”
“You’ve been off the pill for six months? How come you didn’t tell me before now?”
“Oh, I was kind of afraid to tell you, sweetie, because, like you said, no children.”
“That’s right, Sal, but you didn’t need to be on the pill.”
“That’s exactly what I figured when I went off it. I knew that, really, you want us to have a cute little baby of our own.”
“But I didn’t want any cute little babies of our own, I told you. That’s why I had a vasectomy.”
“You had a what! When the Christ did you have a vasectomy?”
“About ten years ago, after I knew definitely I didn’t want children.”
“Ten years! Why didn’t you tell me before we got married?”
“Why didn’t you tell me, after I said no children, that you did, in fact, want children when we got married?”
“Goddamned Jesus fucking Christ. I didn’t say I wanted to eat or breathe after we were married either. I didn’t say I wanted to screw after we got married either, but you managed to figure that one out all by yourself every jeesly night of the week. You idiot! How did you ever become a lawyer? Even a moron knows a woman wants babies. A fucking vasectomy! I could kill—”
“Take it easy, Sal. It’s not the end of the world.”
“Night after night you invaded my body under false pretenses. You squirted that disgusting spunk, with not one live sperm in it, into my body, into my hoping, yearning body. You violated my fundamental integrity as a human being. Get the fuck out of my sight, you prick.”
I was getting worse at this marriage business, not better. That second marriage terminated after only nine months. Since then, I had sometimes been driven by self-disgust at loveless sex—not joyless or passionless sex, just hopeless and loveless sex—to contemplate another matrimonial attempt. But common decency prevented me from following through. I knew my inability to love fully any woman I married, and my indifference to her love for me, gave me too much power to hurt. Against my will, fruitlessly, unavailingly, pathetically—no doubt psychotically—all my love was still reserved for Rosie O’Dell.
MY YEARS WITH THE Department of Justice were challenging and satisfying. But then my unsettled domestic life started to frustrate my advancement in the department. Lucy Barrett, a few years from retirement, had been promoted from assistant deputy minister to deputy minister. She told me how delighted she was to be able to go out of the public service at the top. And the ADM’s job entailed too much humdrum administration and conflict resolution between excellent staff lawyers whose egos, regrettably, were just as big as their abilities. But I was ready for advancement and change and coveted her vacant position. I heard through my secretary’s grapevine that Lucy had recommended me, based on my knowledge of the law, good judgment, and reliability, as her successor. But my political masters were balking. The premier and the current minister of justice were afraid, the word was, that if they appointed me, my footloose and fancy-free ways in private life would reflect immorality on them. I myself traced my persona non grata status to something more specific.
Three years before, the then minister of justice and I had travelled to New York on a government bond issue. When he had practised law, he had insisted on being referred to as William Best. Now that he was in politics, he insisted on being called Billy Best. After our legal briefing on contingent liabilities to the Wall Street underwriters, I returned to the Plaza Hotel with Minister Billy Best, who asked me into the Oyster Bar for a drink. There, my political boss congratulated me on my masterful summary of complicated legal documents, told me to stop calling him “Minister” in private like this, but to call him “Billy.” He could remember, he said, when we were buddies and would have a beer after work at the Ship. Then he added, “I am advised that you would still screw a pile of rocks if you thought there was a snake under it.” He reminded me of my teenaged mates that long-ago summer in the new Gros Morne Park.
Now, my Minister Billy was well-known for his nimble thought processes, but that leap was too non-linear for me altogether and I reacted with some hauteur: “Minister, you have been advised incorrectly.”
“What, you mean you don’t even need a snake under it?” said Minister Billy with a friendly grin as I started to slide off my bar stool. “Don’t take me wrong,” he whispered, placing his hand on my arm. “I’m not criticizing.” He bent his head closer to my ear. “I want you to get me in on some of the action.”
Flashing back to the minister’s wife and three young children kissing him goodbye at the St. John’s airport, I said, “Minister, my duties with the Department of Justice do not include pimping for you.” I slipped to the floor. “With your leave, sir, I shall retire to my room.” Without waiting for the minister’s leave or thanking Billy for the drink, I walked out of the bar.
Upstairs, I wondered why I had done that. I had expressed an outraged morality I did not feel. Then I realized my reaction had been caused by disgust at myself. On the plane home the next morning, the minister looked as highly offended by the cut from his underling as he had last night in the bar. He never spoke a non-official word to me again.
“What the hell d
id you do on that trip,” Lucy asked me a few days after we got back, “that has the minister so dubious about your abilities? I thought you knew your stuff.” When I told her, she responded, “I wish you’d get married and stay married and stop raising false hopes in our political sleazoids.”
When my minister of justice ran for the leadership of his political party at a convention and got elected and became Premier Billy Best, I figured I’d better abandon all hope of advancement to an executive position in the public service. My sense of being a prisoner locked in a downward trajectory was intensified by my mother’s growing illness. When she was finally placed in a personal care home in a closed ward reserved for sufferers from dementia, it came to me that she was only twenty-five years older than I was now.
I LEFT THE DEPARTMENT of Justice and put out feelers to various law firms. A hotshot criminal lawyer named Ed Howlett, who had been a partner of my old lawyer Leonard Barry before he was elevated to the Supreme Court, approached me and suggested we join forces. He’d been practising solo for a couple of years and had no wish to become a cog in the administration of a big law firm. But he’d found that being a sole practitioner had its strains and inconveniences as well. For example, it was hard to recover from the flu or take a stress-free vacation—he was likely to get calls in bed at home or on a beach in Sarasota from distraught clients. A two-man firm was the optimal, he thought, with each partner watching the other’s back and covering for each other when one was off. Ed Howlett was in the news a lot on high-profile criminal cases—domestic murders, rip-offs of municipal funds by town clerks, drug-trafficking punks—but I knew that most of his income came from legal aid, and we could not expect to get rich together. I did need a backup, though, and there were not many other offers. We formed a partnership, a purely working relationship, and it bumped along for a few years. We never saw each other after hours, because I didn’t like him very much, and seldom small-talked in the office, but we shared the overhead, divided the barely adequate income, and allowed each other to take a week off from time to time. I hardly knew the man, and it was this lack of knowledge that kept me from seeing what was about to happen.